Viral Nation (Short Story): Broken Nation

by Shaunta Grimes

  Only I am, and I can’t, and I hate that my cheeks burn with some mix of shame and embarrassment. I remember an old movie I used to watch with my mom every Christmas, about a woman who is in an accident on her way to meet a man at the top of the Empire State Building, and then can’t make herself tell him that she can’t walk. The memory makes things worse.

  Alex brushes a hand across one cheek and then lets it rest on my half thigh, his fingertips barely touching the blanket covering my lap. “It doesn’t hurt as much,” I say. I want to be as strong as I can. I don’t want him to think he has to leave me here again.

  “You’re still on antibiotics and pain medication,” he says. It’s not a question, not when we’ve wheeled the pump that delivers my medication out with us. It’s absurd, to be out there with all of this equipment and no supervision at all. A sign of how absurd everything has become.

  “You can’t leave me again,” I say. Also not a question.

  “I won’t.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead, the way he did before he left me the last time, and stands up.

  “Was it hard to get into the city?” I ask. “Our nurse said no one is allowed in or out.”

  “Not too hard, but not easy either.”

  “What’s Denver like?”

  He shakes his head. “We aren’t in Denver.”

  He was right then. If he had stayed with me right after my surgery, we wouldn’t have found the others later. Something lets go in my chest, some resentment that I didn’t even know I was holding on to. “Where are you?”

  I expect him to say Sacramento or Boise or Salt Lake City. Some city in some state. Instead, he says, “Outside Denver.”

  “What do you mean outside Denver?” I look at Maggie, to see how much of this she’s taking in. She’s sitting next to Alex, wedged under his arm, as close as she can get without climbing into his lap. Her eyes are closed. “Are there two cities in Colorado?”

  Alex shakes his head. “We’re not in a city.”

  “What about the shots? How are they getting you the shots?”

  Maggie flinches at the mention of the painful injections, and Alex soothes one hand down her arm. “We don’t take them.”

  I’m so shocked by this statement that I don’t know how to respond. When I find my voice again, it’s tinged with anger. “Do you want to get sick? Do you want to lose a leg, too?”

  Maggie sits up and looks between me and Alex. I take a breath and try to calm down.

  “We aren’t getting sick,” he says. “None of us have been sick. We had the shots here, before we left. I don’t know why, but none of us are sick.”

  Something about what he says tickles at the back of my mind, but whatever it is, it doesn’t come to me right away. “What’s the plan?” I ask.

  “When you’re healthy enough to leave the hospital, we’ll go to the compound.”

  He makes it sound so easy. It’s impossible not to believe him. “Compound? Really?”

  He smiles, and that is enough for me for now.

  “Where’s Tomas?” he asks. It’s the casualness of his voice, combined with the way that Maggie’s face crumbles as she turns to hide it in his shirt, that almost does me in. I open my mouth but I can’t find any words, so I just shake my head. I see the realization dawn on him, and he takes a breath and nods. “I’m so sorry, Maggie.”

  “Are you staying here with us?” she asks.

  “No, but I won’t be far.”

  “I don’t want you to leave.”

  I don’t want him to, either. When he says, “I’ll be back soon. I won’t leave the city without both of you,” I’m afraid that he’s making promises he can’t keep.

  We make arrangements to meet at the same time the next day, and Maggie wheels me back toward the hospital doors just as Angelica opens them.

  • • •

  We see Alex every day. I think Angelica must be relieved that we’re willing to spend so much time outside without the need for her direct attention. She’s looking better, but still rough.

  We head out right after the doctor has been by to see us in the late morning and we stay until Angelica comes to bring us in for his afternoon rounds. She brings us lunch, outside, and comes every hour or so to check my vitals. She never mentions Alex. She doesn’t even acknowledge that he’s there, and he doesn’t do anything to force her to.

  The doctor looks even more shattered than Angelica. He has bags under his eyes and track marks inside his elbows from the thick suppressant needle that make him look like a junkie. I’m not sure why he’s injecting there and not in his hip, like Angelica does for me and Maggie, until I realize that he must be injecting himself.

  It takes a week for what Alex said the first day to come back and start to make sense. Maggie had a particularly hard time with her shot that morning, and she won’t sit down now.

  “None of you have ever been sick. That’s what you said, isn’t it?” I ask Alex. “I don’t mean a cold or the flu or anything, I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” Of course he does. Sick has a new meaning now. “No. None of us got sick.”

  Angelica calls the medicine a suppressant. I have a foggy memory of her telling me early on that the suppressant doesn’t cure the Virus, it just keeps it tamped down. Like some hibernating monster just waiting to wake up again when the conditions are right.

  “Are you okay, Leanne?” Maggie sounds like she’s on the other end of a mile-long tunnel, her voice barely reaching me. “Leanne?”

  The only thing I see is Alex’s face, and he’s alarmed. “Are you going to faint? Put your head down.”

  He does it for me, pushing on the back of my head until I see the ends of my dark, shoulder-length hair brushing what’s left of my leg. My heart alternates between pounding hard and fast and skipping a few beats. I try to calm down, in case Angelica looks out a window and comes to help me. I breathe. In and out, I say in my head, desperate. In and out. In and out.

  “Jesus,” Alex says when I finally sit up again. “Are you okay?”

  I shake my head, mostly to try to clear it, but he takes it as a no and puts pressure on my back to get me to bend down again. “No, no. God, let me go!”

  “Then what was that?”

  My head spins and I feel like I might throw up. I don’t want to give voice to my thought. I don’t want to make it real. But I look at Maggie, and I know I have to. “We can’t live outside a city.”

  Alex looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “We have houses. It’s not like we’re living in tents or something. It’s fine, really.”

  “You don’t understand.” I wish I didn’t understand either. “We need the suppressant. Angelica said we have to have it every day. For the rest of our lives.”

  “The rest of us are fine without it. You will be, too. It’s just another way to keep us in prison. Like the camps!” Alex is up, pacing. I can almost see his brain working through what I’ve said. “Don’t you see that the cities are just like the camps?”

  “I’m not blind,” I say. “I see that.”

  “Then leave with me. We’ve planted, we even found some chickens and goats. They were looking for a milk cow when I left.”

  “It isn’t the food that’s the problem.” Maggie clutches one of my hands and one of his, and my heart is breaking, inch by slow inch. “Me and Maggie are different. We’ve already been sick. If we don’t get the shots, it will come back.”

  I see what I’m saying sink into him. His dark eyes search my face and then he looks at the ground between his feet, trying to work out some good argument against what I’ve told him. I’m searching for one myself, and there is nothing.

  “So, I’ll stay with you.”

  He says it like he means it, and I think he does. We could do this. Stay here. The city is already restructuring. It’s happening here even faster than anywhere else, because the company that makes the suppressant is here. Lake Tahoe with its weird magic is near here. Reno is the new, second capital of the United
States.

  “Don’t they need you?” I ask, forcing myself to be reasonable, to think about the others.

  Alex looks at Maggie, who looks absolutely miserable, and then at me. I’m pretty sure I don’t look any better. “I need you,” he says, so quietly that I almost miss it.

  I should keep fighting. If our friends are trying to build something outside of an official city, then they need Alex. There aren’t enough of them to lose even one person. But I don’t want to fight. I don’t have any fight left inside me. I can barely bring myself to think about him leaving me again.

  When he takes my hand and leans toward me, I turn my face to him and force myself to make one more effort at reason. “This is selfish.”

  “They’ll be fine,” he says. “They will. And we’ll figure out a way to get to them. It will just take longer. You can’t travel yet anyway.”

  I let myself believe him, because it feels so good. He threads his fingers through my hair at the back of my head and draws my face to his. He kisses me and doesn’t stop until Maggie starts to giggle.

  • • •

  “So, I got offered a job this morning,” he says a week later.

  “What kind of job?” Maggie wants to know. I do, too.

  “They need people to help—”

  “To help what?” I ask when he doesn’t go on.

  He licks his bottom lip and shrugs slightly. “To help sanitize the city.”

  Get rid of the bodies. That’s what he means. I cover my mouth and nose with my hand. Thinking about him going into houses and pulling those poor people out, their bodies decomposing and rotten with the Virus, makes my stomach turn over. “Alex.”

  “Someone has to do it.”

  “Do what?” Maggie asks. “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone has to make the city ready for people to live in it.” Alex reaches out and tugs on the end of her ponytail. “They’ll give me a house, so you can come live with me. I told them that I had a little sister.”

  “Did you tell them that Leanne was your sister, too?”

  He shakes his head and looks at me long enough for me to start to squirm under the scrutiny. “Then what?”

  “I told them we were married.”

  The air goes out of me in one whoosh of an exhale, and I misfire when I try to draw in another breath. “You did what?”

  “What else could I do? They’re putting the kids that don’t have parents in these houses, like foster homes. Would you rather go there?”

  Maggie shakes her head, emphatically. “No.”

  “No,” I say. No, of course not. “But I’m still in high school. I’m only seventeen. They won’t believe you.”

  “There are no more high schools. Do you think they have time or energy to think about how old we are? They need another body to work. They need to do something with the two of you while you’re healing. They believed me.”

  I set aside what he’s said for now and focus on something else. “When do you start your job?”

  “Tonight. The crews are working round the clock. They’re going to build a wall right around the city. They say it’ll keep the Virus out. It’ll protect us.” His voice drips with sarcasm.

  “Are there still sick people?”

  He shakes his head and lowers his voice. “There are so few left, period. It’s bad, Leanne.”

  “But some people are still sick?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The wall isn’t to keep the Virus out, if there aren’t any sick people left. The wall is to keep the people who are left corralled. Like animals. Like the camps. Guilt stabs me, sharp and raw, in my chest. I tighten my hand around Alex’s and make myself say, “You don’t have to stay. You shouldn’t . . . we can . . .”

  “I won’t leave you,” he says. “Not ever again.”

  Now that I have a place to go, it only takes two more days for my doctor to release me from the hospital. No one questions my sudden change in marital status. And Alex is right, no one seems to care at all about my age.

  • • •

  Alex is twenty. He was taken from his sophomore year at the University of Nevada to the camp. My mother would have thought he was too old for me. We both seem ridiculously young to me as we drive away from the hospital with Maggie in the backseat. The doctor has given me a list of instructions for caring for my leg, and I have to go back to see him in two days, but I don’t have to be in the hospital anymore. Maggie was well enough to leave weeks ago, but they let her stay with me. There were no rules anymore. The hospital staff was too sick, too tired, too overwhelmed to worry about one little girl who didn’t cause them any problems.

  It’s not like they had people lining up for her bed, or insurance companies to worry about.

  “It took me forever to get this car,” Alex said. “They’re getting rid of most of them.”

  There aren’t many others on the street. “Why would they do that?”

  “Conserving resources for the Company and the government.”

  There is something in his voice that gives away how sketchy he finds this proposition. “Where did you get this one?”

  “I told them the truth. My wife lost her leg to the Virus and I need a car to get her back and forth from the hospital.” He shoots me a look.

  “Not the whole truth then.”

  “Truth enough.”

  “Are you really married?” Maggie asks. The idea makes her happy. She’s talked to me about it, daydreaming about being my flower girl and the dresses we’d wear if Alex and I really did get married. Mine is white and makes me look like a mermaid. Hers is yellow, with ruffles and a big bow in the back. She’s planned it down to the flavor of cake and the song for the first dance.

  She knows the answer to her own question, but I answer anyway. “No.”

  Alex says “Yes” at the same moment. “They have to believe it or we’ll be separated. It won’t help to have Maggie slip up and say something different. You either.”

  I nod once, but I don’t tell Maggie that it’s true. This doesn’t feel like pretend. It feels too real, and the only way I can deal with it is to just let it go for now.

  The house they gave Alex for us to live in is small, just two bedrooms and maybe a thousand square feet. It’s old and made of brick, and near the university. Alex says they’re starting up classes there soon and he thinks I can get in. I won’t be able to do much more than sit at a desk, not until I have a prosthetic and know how to use it anyway.

  He opens the car door and I wrap my arms around his neck so he can lift me into the wheelchair he’s already set up near Maggie. He carries me past her though and up to the house.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I turn back to see Maggie bouncing on her toes in excitement. “Put me down.”

  “You gonna hop in on one leg?”

  I whip my head back around to look up at him and he bends at the same time to kiss me as he carries me into the house. He walks up a ramp to do it, and I realize that his lie got us a house already set up for my chair. This feels unreal, but not unpleasant. Like playing house.

  “You’re crazy,” I say after he sits me down on the sofa, but there are tiny bits of happiness bubbling around inside me, and I want to hold on to them, so I change the subject. “Where did you get this furniture?”

  Alex runs a hand over the back of his neck, then goes back to the door to take my wheelchair from Maggie. “It was here already.”

  This house belonged to people who died. Maybe someone died right on the sofa I’m sitting on. I look around, and those bubbles of happiness burst and make me sick.

  • • •

  For a while, everything is okay. Maggie and I share the double bed in one room and Alex sleeps alone in the other one. I know he’d rather have me with him, but he doesn’t push. He doesn’t even bring it up.

  No matter if what is left of the whole world thinks I’m married, this is all too weird for me. I’m holding on tight to whatever remains of the old me
, and I’m afraid that getting into bed with Alex will steal the last of it.

  Weird or not, we settle into a family routine. During the day at least. They already have school going for the younger kids and Maggie is so desperate for normal, she slides right in like she’s been there her whole life.

  Alex was right about the university. He drives me there to take some tests, and I score well enough to be admitted to the first class when it starts in the fall. There are dorms, for students who don’t have parents and might otherwise be living in the foster home. The relief that I don’t have to live in them is strong enough to expose the lies I tell myself about not wanting to be married to Alex.

  So we do the things that have to be done. Alex picks up our rations at one of the casinos every week. He works and I heal. We cook together and eat together and tell stories to Maggie at night. In the morning, Alex heads out to sanitize the city. For a while, it feels like we’re going to be all right.

  And then a letter comes. Somehow Pablo got a truck driver named Frank, who delivers food between Sacramento and Denver, through Reno and Salt Lake City, to bring it to Alex.

  “Oh, God,” Alex says several times as he reads it. He goes pale under the deep color he’s picked up working in the sun all summer. “Oh, my God.”

  “What is it?” I ask. Maggie had been on her way to our room and she stops halfway, looking from one of us to the other.

  “They found the compound.”

  “What happened? Is everyone okay?” I feel like I’m coming out of my skin. Like if he doesn’t say something that means something, I’m going to scream. “Who found it?”

  “The Company.”

  “What company?” Maggie asks.

  “The Company,” Alex says. “The Waverly-Stead Company. That’s the only one there is now.”

  Waverly-Stead. The company that makes the suppressant we stand in line for every day.

  “So they found the compound,” I say, feeling myself already trying to minimize. To make it okay, even though I still don’t know what happened. “Is that so bad?”